It’s hard to believe now, but Vladimir Putin was once a “very nervous guy.”
Former President George W. Bush’s national security advisor on Tuesday sketched a fascinating portrait of the Kremlin strongman, explaining the political evolution that led Russia's president into a savage war in Ukraine.
Stephen Hadley recalled the days when Bush looked into the eyes of the inexperienced new Russian president early in his administration to get a “sense of his soul,” as he explained an offer by the US to help bring Russia into the West’s world of market economics and democracy.
“(Putin’s) answer was interesting. He said: 'That's what I want to do. But there are dark forces in Russia. And it's important that they not be awakened. So you need to let me do it in my own time, and in my own way, and at my own pace,” Hadley remembered on Tuesday.
The veteran foreign policy strategist was speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington to mark the release of a new book containing now-declassified foreign policy memos prepared by Bush’s team for Barack Obama’s incoming administration.
The document on Russia explains how Bush had sought to engage Putin, and won some important cooperation, especially after the September 11 attacks in 2001, on issues including missile defense and reducing nuclear weapons stocks. But eventually the oppressive influence of Russian history and Putin’s own resentment towards the West following its Cold War victory began to fracture US-Russia relations.
Hadley had plenty of time to observe Putin up close during multiple meetings and phone calls at Bush’s side. He related one occasion when Bush sent him to Moscow and the Russian leader harangued him for 90 minutes, while sitting on a raised dais and reading a list of grievances about the United States off three-by-five note cards. The memos show that early hopes of major progress with Russia began to founder when Putin lined up alongside France and Germany in opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, possibly after sensing a chance to split the West.
Hadley said that Washington really began to lose Putin in the early 2000s, when he began to become more authoritarian as Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon underwent “color revolutions." The US supported the popular uprisings as examples of oppressed peoples insisting on accountable governments, which it believed would provide stable, prosperous neighbors for Russia.
“Putin didn't see it that way. He thought these uprisings were CIA front operations to install anti-Russian governments on his border. And as a dress rehearsal for destabilizing Russia itself. At that point, we lose him and in 2008 he goes into Georgia,” he said. Russia’s invasion led to the effective freezing of relations between Moscow and Washington until the Obama administration took office intent on a “reset” of relations with the Kremlin. Ironically, the new president experienced exactly the same trajectory, racking up early optimism and achievements with Russia before hostility set in. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 meant relations with the Kremlin were as bad at the end of the Obama term as they had been when Bush left office.
Hadley, who edited the book “Hand-Off,” discussed a theory that Putin’s purpose was always rooted in restoring Russian power after the Soviet collapse. “He thought initially, you could do that in alliance with the West — but he decided he had to do it in Russia's own individual way as a sort of separate civilization between East and West."
“I think particularly during COVID, when he was very isolated, buried away in the Soviet archives learning history. … he came up with this notion that what Russia needs to do is reestablish not the Soviet empire but the Russian Empire — reestablish control over traditional Russian lands, which unfortunately includes the Baltic states, Moldova, Poland, a lot of other territory.”
In a postscript to the transition document on Russia, Thomas Graham, the National Security Council’s senior director for Russia under Bush, concluded that a genuine strategic partnership between the US and Russia was probably never realistic -- though a constructive, enduring one may have been. “It depended heavily on the choices that Putin would make,” Graham wrote.
We now know how Putin chose to act. But the memos are a fascinating reminder that grappling with global crises and relations with hostile powers in real time is a lot harder than pundits make it look with benefit of hindsight. The papers make it possible to trace change in Putin’s attitudes and the way US policy influenced that process. They also lay bare a limitation that is often forgotten in Washington's foreign policy debates: American presidents can seek to shape the world, but outsider forces and personalities -- including powerful leaders like Putin -- may still decide how things turn out.
Graham ends his postscript by arguing that the lesson of the past 20 years or so is that the idea of being a great power is central to Russia’s identity and purpose. Today's brutal war in Ukraine shows “how far Moscow is prepared to go to defend its interests," he writes.
Hadley views the war as integral to what he saw as Putin’s desire to reconstitute Russian power over lands it once controlled. “This is what Ukraine is all about. It is basically ending Ukrainian sovereignty, ending its independence, bringing it within Russia’s fold, because with Ukraine, Russia can be an empire. Without Ukraine, Russia can’t.”
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